Happy Halloween to all the online marketing ghosts, ghouls, and goblins out there.

Have you ever heard or received a really bad piece of online marketing advice? Maybe the recommendation was founded on total hearsay, completely out of date or you discovered that the suggestions actually hurt, rather than helped? Scary! At one time or another we’ve all received the trick and not the treat in our internet marketing candy basket.

In this post you’ll find 20 scary SEO, social media and content marketing tales from the team at TopRank Online Marketing and from our friends on Twitter @TopRank, fans on Lee’s Facebook page and the TopRank Facebook page.

BOO! Scary Stories From the Crypt

1 – Classic scary: “Build great content and it will attract visitors all on it’s own. SEO isn’t necessary for good content to stand out.”

As Lee likes to say, “Great content isn’t great until it gets discovered, consumed and shared.” Competition for attention online is tough and unless efforts are made to promote great content or build social promotion into the content creation itself, there’s a chance it won’t be able to attract the audience it deserves. Great content + smart and relevant promotion = WIN!

2 – Marketing Bandwagon: As people in the SEO community jump on the content marketing bandwagon, many seek advice on how to incorporate content in their search engine centric online marketing mix. One of the scarier pieces of SEO / Content Marketing advice is: “Content Marketing’s Goal Is Not To Convert Customers Directly, To Acquire Leads Directly, or To Make Sales Directly.”

Sure, you don’t execute a financial transaction for a product within the text of an article, but the “buy this” button is only one click a way. The “contact us” for a lead form is just one click away. Content Marketing is designed specifically create the information customers need to become aware, interested and to consider products and services. Further, content marketing is also designed to specifically influence customer leads, sales and conversion actions. That’s called optimizing across the sales cycle and it’s been around for a very long time.

While meta descriptions are often used in the search snippet displayed in search results, they content of meta descriptions are not a ranking factor according to Google. Meta descriptions could influence clicks on search results which could lead to other signals affecting ranking, but as a driver of ranking on it’s own? The not so scary advice from Google: “Even though we sometimes use the description meta tag for the snippets we show, we still don’t use the description meta tag in our ranking.” Matt Cutts, Distinguished Engineer at Google.

SEO Horror Stories From The TopRank Team

4 – Lee Odden – The competition is doing (tactic XYZ) so we need to do that too.

5 – Brian Larson – Brand is not important – I’ve heard from several SEO ‘experts’ that there’s no need use your brand name in your onpage copy and meta fields, since people will always be able to find your site if they know your name.

7 – Shawna Kenyon – Stuff your content full of keywords. This is not only a bad user experience but Google doesn’t really fancy it either.

8 – Sara Duane-Gladden – Why would you need to write keyword optimized webpage content when you can hide keywords in HTML? Just make text the same color as the background or set it to such a tiny size no one can see it. Search engines will love it and people won’t notice it at all.

9 – Susan Misukanis – Reciprocal linking is where it’s at. I link to you, you link back to me and we’ll both succeed! More links is always better, right?

19 – Carolyn Shelby – We dont’ need a website. We have a Facebook Page.

20 – Dave Roher – So we had the designer put all of the content in the image. Doesn’t that page look great?

21 – Wendy Bauer Piersall – Don’t worry about (Not Provided) because it will only be 5% or so of your search engine traffic.

22 – Patricia Skinner – Ah, that would be the advice to use link building software. Hands down the scariest SEO advice ever.

23 – Lydia Fabry Mazorol – “We think it would be well advised for us to get the link building [spammers] we’ve been paying to add us to directories and random sites for years and now pay them to clean up that mess!” #pay?!!!

26 – Becky Ryan – “Oh we tried to do that Social Media, and we were doing great until Matt Cutts said Google hates. My boss stopped all of us and after that my phone crashed, so I have been on twitter for months”

27 – Carri Bugbee – You can get 10k Twitter followers for just $5! [BTW, you actually can. They just happen to be fake.]

28 – Brian Crouch – “Be needlessly controversial! Say things you don’t mean just to get a rise out of people! Curse-filled comments on a post gets links! ”

29 – Tammy Emineth – “Hey! I can get 3000 backlinks for just $9.99!”

30 – Ross Dunn – Most recently it was an affiliate “Guru” posting to all of his followers delight that it is a good idea to buy comment link building services through Fiverr. I nearly lost my lunch.

A lot of people that are learning about SEO, Social Media and Content Marketing may find it difficult to tell the difference between scary and smart when it comes to online marketing advice. Our advice is to connect with a trusted and experienced resource or better a network of resources that you can bounce ideas off of. Test things for yourself and be involved with the industry and you’ll soon be able to see how many zombie marketers there really are.

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Ashley Zeckman is the Director of Agency Marketing for TopRank Marketing. In addition to finding innovative ways to showcase the exceptional work of her team, she is also responsible for creating digital marketing programs that drive customer acquisition and growth for the agency. Her background includes expertise in everything from content marketing strategy to branding, account management and social media.

Outside of her role at TopRank Online Marketing, Ashley prides herself on being a great home chef, painter, prankster and dog mom.

I completely agree with the SEO scares! A lot of clients we work with have been scammed in the past or know other companies that have just “used” SEO and are “done” with it. Thanks for bringing light to these scares!

Yes there are so many different tips, strategies, steps on the internet about SEO, social media marketing, content marketing. All you need to do is to follow a reputable establish network or resources. Interesting out of the box post on scary online marketing tales. hahahha number 31 we all know the truth. 🙂

I’ve seen a lot of the marketing tales mentioned here in different forums, even in articles as “professional” advice. Once for our site searchlabeling offered us to buy “fresh leads”, a lot of offerings of backlinks, too. I think a lot of entrepreneurs may be tempted by the easy success.

I think the User Experience matters a lot in SEO. If you build a content covered with good information, good strategies and with good tactics then I’m sure ,that is easy for you to establish a position in the market.